


Cocaine and Abel

by storm_warning



Series: a head full of phantoms; a fistful of threads [2]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (the 'if you want' tag will make more sense when i put up chapter two), Animal Death, Canonical Character Death, Darth Maul is the Worst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Unreliable Narrator, and i say this so affectionately, didnt intend this to be romantic but if you want, do not ever accuse me of writing a "redemption fic", highlight that and put that in bold please, maul is a bastard all through this its just that he becomes a bastard who has friends, maulsoka shippers fuck RIGHT off though. Stay away from my work genuinely go away, not the most graphic thing ever but im tagging it to be safe, tags will be updated as I go, the 'graphic depictions of violence' tag will also be relevant in chapter two, to read it as rexmaul thats between you and god
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 11:26:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30021051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storm_warning/pseuds/storm_warning
Summary: Six months after the defeat of Darth Sidious and the end of the Clone Wars, the Republic-- and the Senate-- are only just beginning to get back on their feet. They've relegated most of their captured Separatist leaders to temporary exile on unremarkable outer-rim worlds, with varying levels of security to accompany them.Darth Maul, surprisingly, has some of the least security measures of all of them. Maybe they didn't think he was a threat. Maybe they didn't have the resources to spare so soon after the war; maybe they didn't deem him important enough to bother.Maybe they simply forgot he was there.He's beginning to think theydid, actually, until someone shows up at his door.
Relationships: CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, Darth Maul & Ahsoka Tano, Darth Maul & CT-7567 | Rex, Darth Maul & Savage Opress
Series: a head full of phantoms; a fistful of threads [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2183673
Comments: 11
Kudos: 32





	Cocaine and Abel

**Author's Note:**

> PHANTOM PAINS SEQUEL BECAUSE IM INSANE
> 
> i hope you like reading about bastards and emotional repression as much as i do because oh boy is there a lot of that in this fic!!!!!
> 
> and also of course: big big big thank you to tem (or theshoutingslytherin here on ao3) for looking this over for me :']c
> 
> (the title is taken from Cocaine and Abel by Amigo The Devil, or, the extremely very unofficial theme for this fic because holy shit dude that song goes hard)

As he does most days, Maul wakes up shuddering; as he does all of them, he wakes up alone. 

The taste of burnt flesh is thick on his tongue, and his mind swims with vacant, flickering scraps of half-forgotten night terrors. 

He scrapes himself out of the blanket-nest that makes up his bed, familiar pain shadowing his stiff movements-- a storm has been roiling in the sky since yesterday, looming dark over the crop-fields. He clumsily grabs for a clean tunic and set of pants, and trusts that the heat of his shower will shake the last of the phantoms from his head. 

It doesn’t; but it chases them to a far enough crevice that he stops flinching at shadows in the corners, and he’ll take what he can get. 

By the time he turns the tap off, the drumbeat of falling water carries on somewhere in the distance, muffled. The rain must have started.

He sighs heavily. It seems he has a day or three of getting soaked through to look forward to. Maybe four, if he’s unlucky. Maybe he’ll just stay inside until it lets up and let all the cattle starve. It’s not like they’ll die without four days of food; he’s gone far longer than that without eating himself.

Resigned, he towels himself off and pulls his clothes on. The section of his house’s main room that serves as the kitchen is sparse and meticulously-organized as ever, and Maul leans heavily against a counter while a serving’s worth of broth begins to simmer on the stove. 

When he’s satisfied with its heat, he pours it into a mug and sips at it idly as he watches the sky darken.

His eyes drift to the door, upon which hangs a heavy cloak and his embarrassingly unwieldy sunhat. In the past, he’d detest being seen wearing such a thing, but he _does_ often need the protection it offers from the sun; and besides, nobody else is around to see. In their endless quest to provide him with only the barest necessities, the Republic hadn’t bothered to provide him with a hat that actually accounted for, oh, you know, his _horns_ , and so after no small amount of frustration he’d simply taken his only good knife to it and carved holes for them himself. 

He would have just pushed it down on his head and let the points of his horns do the work for him, but they had grown rough and blunted in the absence of a file with which to tend to them and the time in which to do it. Now, of course, he has plenty of the latter, but whichever Republic personnel had given him this house had seemed to be determined to leave him with as few potential weapons as possible. 

He only owns four knives, three of which are fit for nothing more than cutting butter. Previously the number of butter-knives had been closer to six, but the metal was cheap at best and his attempts to sharpen them himself had rendered a few unusable. 

The good one, the sharp one, he carries on his person wherever he goes. A small comfort. 

Still, the lack of a file bothers him less for his horns than for his _nails_ \-- he had briefly taken to scraping at the corners of doorframes to whittle them down in his agitation, before abruptly realizing what that would look like to anyone who might visit the house and forcing himself to stop. 

The thought still makes him grind his teeth. He would be tempted to tear this place to the ground if his only chance of getting _out_ of here wasn’t _good behavior_. 

Not that he hadn’t _tried_ to get out. But the walk to the nearest settlement is very, very long, and Maul’s legs are stiff on the best of days, and he really just couldn’t be _bothered_ after a while. What would he do, anyway? His mother is dead. The Shadow Collective has all but forsaken him. The Republic would put a price on his head and he’d be hunted down in days. 

He’s not even supposed to be _alive_. 

Maybe that’s why he hasn’t tried harder. Maybe being forgotten on some backwater outer-rim farming planet is the closest he can get to dying without shoving a blaster down his throat himself.

He takes a long sip of broth. The same as most mornings, then. 

The empty mug goes into the sink. Maul goes to the bench by the door, and begins to pull his boots on. Best to get out of the house now, before the storm properly begins-- he’s made the mistake of waiting before. He has the scar to show for it, a long jagged thing stretching across his shoulder that’d been lashed into it by the limb of a falling tree.

These winds are calmer than that, for now, but Maul is far smarter than to assume it’ll hold. The weather on this gods-forsaken planet is no kinder than he is. 

Something pricks at some distant corner of his awareness, strikingly and bewilderingly familiar. A presence-- no, a _pair_ of prescences, almost as if--

Someone knocks on the door.

Maul freezes in place, a bolt of alarm frosting up his spine. 

The rain pounds at the windows, unrelenting. Maybe he heard wrong. Maybe it was a hallucination, maybe the wind knocked something over outside and--

The knock repeats; Maul flinches. No. Alright. 

He gathers his wits and stands up. Tells himself to open the door. His feet refuse to move. There are only so many people who could be behind it-- someone lost in the storm, maybe, a traveler looking for shelter. He could slam it shut in their face and be done with it all.

Travelers don’t come past here.

No one comes past here. He pulls the door open. 

“Hello there,” Ahsoka Tano half-shouts over the wind, cloak pulled tightly around herself. At her shoulder, as he so often seems to, stands Rex. 

Maul heavily considers letting go of the door and allowing the storm to slam it shut again.

“ _What_ ,” he says instead, laced with contempt, “are _you_ doing here.” 

Tano has the nerve to grin sheepishly, like she’s not just shown up at his _house_ , completely unannounced, shivering and soaked through by the rain. Like they’re not the first sentient beings he’s seen in months. 

She opens her mouth to respond, but whatever she says is drowned beneath the deafening crack of thunder that sounds overhead. All three of them startle. 

At once, the rain begins to bucket down twice as heavily, and the sky darkens ominously to match. Just as well, Maul supposes. He turns his eyes to the ceiling and gathers every scrap of patience he can manage; then he steps to the side, gesturing for them to come in. 

He glares sullenly at the trail of drips left on the floor as they shuffle inside, and closes the door solidly behind them. For a moment, there is silence. 

“ _Well_ ? I can’t imagine your _masters_ are happy that you’ve come to see me. That is, if they even _know_ ,” Maul snaps.

Rex is the first to respond. “We’re here on behalf of the Republic, actually. They’ve assigned us to… check in on your progress,” he says uncertainly. He casts an unintelligible glance at Tano, who nods her confirmation. 

...Huh. Maul hadn’t thought the Republic remembered he was _there_ , let alone cared enough to actually send someone to _check in_ on him. He’s not entirely sure how he feels about the notion.

His face pinches with irritation. “And I suppose it was beyond their capabilities to give me any sort of _warning_ , was it?”

Something almost apologetic passes through Rex’s expression. “They, uh-- didn’t want to give you time to prepare. To hide anything.” 

Maul raises his eyeridges at that. “ _Did_ they, now.” 

As if he _has_ anything to hide. His house is only stocked with the barest essentials, and he hasn’t yet grown bored enough to consider theft. And what else would he be concealing? The blueprints of some grand plan to overthrow those in power and take over the galaxy for himself? The thought would be laughable if it weren’t… entirely reasonable of someone else to think of him. 

Or it would have been, before-- 

_Before_. 

Tano shrugs, snapping Maul out of his thoughts. “I told them it was a bad idea, but they didn’t listen.”

His eyeridges lift again, skeptical. “And then they sent… let’s see, an ex-Jedi and an ex-Commander? That would make you two a pair of civilians, wouldn’t it? How very responsible of them to entrust you with the task.”

“It’s not like we’re at war anymore,” Tano points out. “They chose us to do this because we worked together with you to defeat Sidious.”

If Maul flinches at his former Master’s name, he refuses to acknowledge it. 

“‘ _Worked together’_ ,” he says disbelievingly. “As I recall it, we barely tolerated each other's presence long enough to kill him and be done with it.”

He moves away from the door, pacing around them in a half-circle and aiming a pointed look at Rex. “In fact, I seem to recall your _brother_ doing most of the work to get us there. Oh, my mistake,” he asks, dripping with mock politeness, “is he still catatonic?”

Rex’s face shutters. “He’s recovering,” he says, tone clipped and impartial. Even after all this time, professionalism is where he crawls back to under duress. Interesting.

Maul hums dismissively. Something cold and unfamiliar winds through his chest, a heavy weight in his lungs. He’s not sure where it’s coming from, or even how long it’s been there.

He wishes it would leave. He wishes _they_ would leave; they’ve been here a minute at most, and he already feels a headache coming on. 

“So,” he finally snaps, and spreads his arms in a prompting gesture. “Exactly what _progress_ are you here to monitor? You’ve seen me. You’ve seen where I live. There’s nothing else here, unless you care to make the walk to where the cattle are kept.”

As if summoned by his words, a particularly vicious gust of wind rattles the window panes. 

Tano gives him a strange look. “You keep cattle?”

“So it’s an interrogation, then.”

“I asked you _one_ question.”

“And I’m sure there will be more to follow,” Maul levels. 

“And the sooner you _answer_ them, the sooner we can be on our way,” Rex says pointedly.

Maul sighs, irritated. “ _Yes_ , there is a herd of cattle here which I tend to. There’s also a small vegetable garden, though I assume it’s being demolished by the current weather.”

One corner of Tano’s mouth quirks up. “You have a _garden_?”

“Don’t look so surprised,” Maul snaps. “I had to do _something_ to fill the time after your masters so kindly left me here to rot.”

He says nothing of the days-- weeks, really-- he had spent doing nothing at all when he had first arrived, drifting through his days in an aimless haze. He had been left with several basic manuals for things pertaining to what he was _supposed_ to be doing-- care of farm animals, care of simple crops-- that he had somehow managed to work through several times over without retaining a single word. 

“You grow all your own food?”

“Grow or slaughter, yes.”

The simplest explanation for why he had eventually roused himself into activity would be plain, sheer _boredom_ . The other parts of it-- something brushing gentle but persistent against some almost-forgotten part of his mind, flickering snatches of a presence he’d felt, there and gone like an after-image in the dark; a voice urging him to _get up, brother--_

\--he’d--

\--he’d rather think of the clawing boredom. Rather think it was the _only_ thing that clawed at him.

“This place is sparser than half the barracks I’ve ever seen. Is this really all they gave you?” Rex is saying-- he sounds baffled, as if he was somehow expecting something more.

“Yes,” Maul replies flatly.

“No personal items at _all_? Entertainment or anything?”

“ _No_.” Maul pauses. “There is a deck of playing cards on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. But I have no use for it.”

Even if he _did_ have any personal items to speak of, it’s hardly like he’d be foolish enough to place any real importance upon them. Attachment is a weakness; weakness is easily exploited. That’s as simple as it gets-- the kind of stuff taught to children, really. 

Still, he does enjoy having the one good knife around. And it’s not like that idiotic hat is of much use to anyone else, now that he’s thoroughly mangled it to suit his own head.

He relays this information, hoping it will satisfy them enough to stop _asking_. Yet still, the questions continue.

“--and you only have the one knife. No other weapons?”

“If I had a blaster, I would’ve eaten it by now,” Maul says bluntly, and ignores the startled look his-- _guests_ , he begrudgingly acknowledges-- give each other.

“And-- you haven’t been out to the settlement?”

“No; and I’m sure the residents would be pleased to tell you the same. I hardly think I'd be welcomed with open arms.” 

He barely makes it to the barn on his bad days. The legs the Republic had fitted him with are far more tolerable than the ones from Death Watch, but his mind is perfectly amenable to filling in the gaps of physical pain with its own phantom conjurations.

And the cattle had been doing well enough without his interference, anyway; they had fields to graze on and ponds to drink from and trees to shelter under, and the notion of-- of _caring_ for any kind of plant or animal had been so foreign to him that it had almost seemed laughable. 

But the almost-presence had kept urging him on, quiet and soft and so achingly familiar that Maul, in his weakness, had done nothing at all to fight it. And the happiness that had sung around him in the Force when he had fed the animals and gathered himself and knelt down in the dirt to plant seeds had not been _his,_ but it had _been there,_ and even now he doesn’t know what to make of that.

At the time, his thoughts had been something like _this is humiliating_ and after that _he’d probably be better at this than me,_ and then he’d had to stop and go inside for how badly his hands had begun to shake, and the deep aching sadness that had soaked through him had been equal parts _his_ and _not-his_. 

Tano’s voice draws him from his thoughts. “Do you meditate often?” 

“When I can.”

In truth, he hasn’t been able to cast himself far enough into the Force to properly meditate since he first arrived. He always found himself pulled back into his body, skittish at shadows in crevices and creaks in the floorboards. Things that should have been trained out of him years ago. Things that _were_ trained out of him years ago. 

It hadn’t deterred him at first. Fear was simply another tool, another path towards focus. But-- when he’d started to sense the almost-presence flickering around him, and it had felt so-- so _soft_ , like it had somehow managed to-- _blunt_ itself, dull itself down, and it had sparked and caught against the too-sharp corners of his mind, like silk catching on torn skin--

That had made him--

That had made him _afraid_ , because he refused to find another name for what coursed through him, still refuses now. _Grief_ was not the way of the Sith. It had no place in his body, no place in him.

 _Has_. Has no place. 

Maul shakes his head, scattering the thoughts.

“Are you two done pestering me with useless questions? Surely you must be convinced by now that I’m not about to go raise chaos on a whim,” he snaps.

“It doesn’t matter what _we’re_ convinced of. It matters what the Republic wants to hear-- what the _Senate_ wants to hear,” Tano retorts. “I don’t think they’re going to like the sound of _‘oh, he told us nicely that he’ll be on his best behavior, we took his word for it, I’m sure it’ll be fine’_ . They want _proof_.”

Impatience and irritation rear their bramble-crowned heads inside Maul. He scoffs. “Look around. I have nothing _left_ to give you but my word. Your Senate doesn’t want _proof_ ; they want to shield themselves from the fact that they tossed me somewhere they couldn’t see and left me to _rot in the dirt.”_

His words curl into a vengeful growl at the end. Tano scowls. 

Her fangs glint sharply in the light as she snaps her reply. “Would you rather be _rotting_ in a Republic prison cell? You were put here because the Senate is trying to get back on its feet after the kriffing _war--_ the war that _you_ had a hand in starting, need I remind you, _former Sith Lord--_ ”

“You think I _chose to fight?_ ” Maul snarls, cutting her off. “ _I--_ ”

He stops abruptly, words dying on his tongue as he catches up with what he’s saying. The tension crackling through the air flattens out into something smoother, colder. If Maul didn’t know better, he’d think it was surprise.

Tano blinks. She looks taken aback. 

Rex speaks into the silence, his voice strained. “ _None_ of us chose to fight.”

Maul’s next breath shudders on the intake. 

“I was born into-- I was born _for_ it.” Rex gestures in Tano’s direction. “Ahsoka was _fourteen_ when the war started. And _you--”_

He lapses back into silence, hand falling to his side. 

Maul swallows against the bitter, painful thing that’s made itself a home in his throat. 

“I--” he starts, and then stops, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

If he had--

If he had been given a choice, if he-- if he hadn’t been--

\--if--

\--the thought is too much to bear. 

“Get out of my house,” he says, quiet and even. “ _Please_.”

His guests share a look that he can’t quite parse. Tano blows out an annoyed breath. 

“Look,” she says. “If we leave and report back, and we’re ordered to come straight back here and get something better, I don’t want to hear a _single_ word out of you about it. Got it?”

Maul is too tired to argue further. He just wants them _out_. “Fine.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Tano snaps, and pulls the front door open-- or, she _tries_ to, except that the wind wrenches the doorknob straight out of her hand and slams it shut again. She blinks, shock splayed across her face.

Maul feels quite suddenly like someone is playing some grand cosmic joke on him. 

Wind howls against the window-panes like it’s laughing at them all, buffeting the trees outside so hard that their limbs shriek harshly against one another. 

Some last sliver of light slips out of the sky, and the rain turns from a downpour into a true _flood_ , sheets of water blowing almost sideways across the ground. It would be truly foolish to go out in this.

A holo-snap of lightning whites out Maul’s vision briefly, and he fails miserably at concealing his flinch. A handful of seconds later, thunder rumbles low and dangerous in the distance.

It would be truly, _truly_ foolish to go out in this.

A fresh wave of phantom agony washes through Maul’s lower body; only through the practiced reflex of one taught for years to ignore pain does he manage not to react.

He lets a slow breath out through his nose. “If you _must_ ,” he says, clawing the words out from some last paper-thin reserve of patience, “I _suppose_ you may stay here until the worst of the storm passes. If only because I feel the Republic wouldn’t take very kindly to me delivering your charred corpses to them after you’re struck by lightning on the walk back to your ship.”

Tano looks like she’s about to snap at him for a moment; then the fight drains from her. “You have a point. They’d probably have your head on a stick.”

“Don’t _tempt_ me.”

There’s a beat of silence. 

“So… where did you say that deck of cards was, again?” Rex asks.

Maul sighs miserably. “...The bottom shelf.”

Rex starts towards the bookcase. “You like Canasta?”

“Canasta?”

“It’s a card game,” Tano offers. “It was popular in the GAR. Rex taught me to play.”

“I’ve… never played it,” Maul says slowly, and distantly wonders where he would have told someone his day was going to go if he has been asked that morning.

“And I’ve never dealt to a former Sith Lord in his own damn house before. First time for everything,” Rex calls from in front of the shelf.

“And _who_ exactly says I’m going to be _playing_?”

“You got anything better to do?” Tano asks skeptically, and walks over to kneel down in front of the caf table in the center of the room. Touché. 

Canasta, as Maul quickly gathers, is an absolutely bewildering game. 

He scowls at his newest hand of many and turns out a red three onto the table. Tano turns out two more, and bares her teeth in a grin. Maul’s scowl deepens.

Rex had dealt again, so Tano picks a card from the pile first and tucks it into her hand with a carefully neutral look on her face. She plucks out a different card and puts it on the discard pile: the king of hearts.

Maul draws the next card-- the four of diamonds-- and tosses it back to the pile with a hum, covering up the king.

Nothing at all happens to signal it: no buzz of electricity, no warning in the Force. One moment he sees his hands in front of him, holding his cards, and behind that the table and his guests and the rest of the room-- 

\--and the next he sees nothing at all.

The bolts of alarm that spike out from beside him to mirror his own tell him that he hasn’t gone blind, at least. He blinks, and after a moment he can make out the faint outline of the windows.

“The storm must’ve knocked the power out,” Rex says, and Maul growls his annoyance. Every time he thinks this day has finally hit rock-bottom, it finds new ways to careen even farther down. 

“Give me a moment.” He sets his cards on the table and braces himself against it, trying not to wince at the pain that lances through his legs as he slowly winches himself into a standing position. He senses rather than sees Tano frown, but she says nothing. 

Using the furniture as a guide, he slowly walks over to a cupboard under the kitchen counter and pulls out a small basket which holds a jumbled assortment of candles. He sets a few on the counter and fumbles in a drawer until he finds a small metal lighter. 

Its flame shines like a beacon in the murky darkness of the house, casting long, spiderwebbing shadows along the walls nearest to him. He lights the candles as quickly as he can without burning himself and returns it to the drawer.

He stares at the candles on the counter, frozen as he watches the tiny lights dance and flicker in the gloom. He can’t even feel the heat of them from here; it’s too feeble to reach him. The flames are miniscule, like stars in a clear night sky. There is no roar of a bonfire, no bitter stench of burnt meat. They are clean and controlled. Harmless.

They are harmless. There is no layer of filth coating the floor, no stinging, biting things scuttling up the walls with their muddied black carapieces. The sweet smell of rotting meat does not hang so thick and cloying in his lungs that he would vomit if he had anything left in his tattered stomach-- it is certainly not coming from _him,_ and his abdomen does not crawl with infection, his legs do _not--_

\--do not. They--

\--they are _harmless_.

He pulls an unlit candle from the basket and tips it into one of them, catching the wick. Heat brushes briefly against his hand and he ignores how it begins to shake.

He puts the candle back down onto the counter. He’s unable to tear his eyes away from the flames even as he tracks the footsteps quietly approaching him.

Tano wordlessly takes a candle from the basket and begins to assist him in lighting more of them, handing a couple to Rex-- Rex? Maul hadn’t noticed him get up-- and placing the lit ones out across nearby surfaces.

Soon, the room burns through with light. Maul shivers in the faint heat, a cold sweat beginning to crawl down his back. He casts out his focus for something else-- for _anything_ else, and ends up landing upon the howl of the storm outside, the way that it thrums against the walls, the ceiling. He latches onto the sound like a lifeline.

“--aul? Maul?” 

He snaps his eyes open. “Yes?” 

“You-- uh. You wanna keep playing?” That’s Rex. Right. 

“I-- yes,” he says after a moment, and takes a step around the corner of the counter.

Except he doesn’t, because his knee is hitting the floor. 

He has a second to think _what_ before a fresh wave of agony rushes through his lower half, so strong it pushes air from his lungs, chokes off his throat. He struggles for a moment, gasping for breath like one grapples for purchase on the side of a cliff.

He stares at the grain of the floor helplessly, bent down on his hands and knees. Afterimages burn through his vision, from the flamelight, or from--

Someone is kneeling down next to him. 

“...Maul?” Tano asks, and it sounds-- _wrong,_ somewhere in her voice; it’s not sharp enough, there’s not enough _anger_. Nobody should say his name that softly. 

In fact, the only other person who he remembers saying his name like that was--

\--was--

_\--stop it._

“It’s nothing,” he bites out, trying to collect himself.

“Banthashit,” Tano says, but there’s no heat behind it. “I can sense the pain coming off you without even trying. You’re doubled over on the _floor_ , for kriff’s sake.” 

He manages to pull himself together enough to look up at her. “It’s-- _fine_. The air pressure change from the storm causes some… complications with my prosthetics. That’s all.”

Tano’s eyes flash with shock. “You-- have you been in this much pain this _entire_ _time_?”

“It comes and goes,” Maul hisses.

Surely enough, the pain is already beginning to ebb back out of him. It doesn’t leave _completely_ , of course, it hardly ever does, but it does recede back to the steady buzz he’s accustomed to rather than white-hot spikes of agony.

Unsteadily, he drags himself up from the floor. Tano rises as well, watching him.

“Are there any painkillers you can take?” Rex asks quietly. 

Maul fixes him with a glare. “Do you honestly believe they _left_ me with any?” He says, and a touch of that old bitterness seeps into his voice.

It’s not entirely true that he’d been left with no painkillers at _all--_ the basic medical kit he’d found in the fresher cabinet had held about a week’s worth of them. It’s just that, you know, he’s been here _longer than a week_. 

“Have you tried doing any meditation for it?” Tano asks before Rex can reply. 

Maul blinks. “Meditation?”

“...You know— for healing?” Tano says slowly.

“Why would meditation be used for _healing_?” Maul asks, bewildered.

Several expressions pass over Tano’s face in rapid succession. Out of them all, Maul can only place a flash of anger; though, unusually, it doesn’t seem to be directed at him. 

“What do the Sith use meditation for?” Tano asks carefully. 

Maul squints. “...The Sith teach _focus_ through meditation. We draw our pain and anger inwards, and temper it into something more; something stronger,” he continues when she doesn’t answer. “It’s not something I would expect the Jedi to know.”

“You’re right,” Tano says, finally. There’s a crease in her brow. “They don’t teach that. They teach us to release our pain to the Force, so that we may heal our bodies and our minds. So that we may be at peace.”

Maul snorts derisively. “The Sith don’t think very highly of _peace_.” 

“And the Jedi don’t think very highly of unnecessary suffering.”

Anger flares through Maul. “ _Unnecessary suffering,”_ he parrots. “Are you here to _pity_ me? Is that it?”

“I-- that’s not what I meant,” Tano snaps. “But you can’t possibly think being in constant pain is _helping_ you.”

“I draw my power from it,” Maul replies, speaking slowly like he’s talking to a child. Which, he supposes, he _is_.

“The power to _what_ ? Play poker? Water your garden?” Rex cuts in, and Maul swivels his glare to the other man. “What _power_ do you possibly need anymore?”

Maul, aggravatingly, finds that he doesn’t have a good answer to that. 

“I can teach you,” Tano says suddenly, and seems surprised at her own words.

“What?” Maul snaps, turning back to her.

“I can teach you the healing meditations, if… if you want me to. Nothing particularly advanced, but I know the basics well enough to run someone else through them.”

Maul opens his mouth to refuse, to tell her he has no need for it, but something-- nudges him, pushes at that tender corner of his mind he so desperately tries to pretend isn’t there at all. The same _something_ that might have once driven him to drag himself out of bed, to feed himself. It’s an unsettling feeling; he is helpless against it. 

“ _Why_?” he asks instead.

Tano furrows her brow like she’s not certain herself.

“ _Because_ it’s unnecessary,” she tells him finally, and shrugs.

It’s such a strikingly _Jedi_ sentiment that Maul almost wants to laugh for the sheer irony of it all.

“Fine,” he says, lifting his eyeridges. “I’ll indulge you.”

She leads him back to the middle of the room, and instructs him to kneel across from her on the floor. Rex follows them after a moment, settling on a nearby couch with curiosity shining in his eyes.

“Alright,” Tano says, and takes in a breath, calmly, slowly. “The starting object to all Jedi meditation is to open your mind, and allow the Force to flow freely through you. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. You don’t have to let all your shields down, but don’t fight what comes to you.”

Maul’s mouth twitches with irritation, but he reigns it in, forcing himself to stay still and take even breaths in time with hers. It’s far from perfect-- he’s wound up like a tense spring, poised to jump up at the slightest sign of attack. Warily, he allows some of his attention to slip away from maintaining the durasteel spike-pit of shielding he’s expertly wound around his mind over the years. A sliver of it loosens, tearing away from the rest like it's rotted through with rust. 

A wave of _calm_ presses around that wretched corner of his mind again, much stronger for the newly missing shields, and he’s so focused on staying still that he forgets to bat it away. With his eyes shut, it feels like he’s floating a layer away from wakefulness, the sensation curling around him like a memory he can’t quite place. 

“Good,” Tano murmurs distantly, and Maul realizes with a faint shock that the calm is coming half from the almost-presence and half from _her_. “Now: I want you to focus on a recent memory. It can be anything-- just let them drift through your mind, and the right one will come to you.”

Maul makes himself take an even breath, and slips yet further into the meditation-haze. Broken snatches of benign memories float through his perception, jagged like the shards of a broken mirror. Slowly, ever so slowly, he feels more of his shields fall away, leaving him more exposed than he’s been in years. Every time his instinctual well of alarm snaps for him to raise them again, protect himself at all costs, the cloud of _calm_ soothes it down until it’s nothing but a background whisper.

Feather-light, a memory reaches out to him among the others.

Hesitantly, he pushes the notion through what he’s beginning to recognise as the fragile, thread-spun shadow of a connection between minds. This isn’t something he’s been taught-- the only use the Sith have for accessing the minds of others is to reach in forcefully and claw out what they desire themselves. 

“Alright,” Tano says, her voice barely above a whisper. “Reach into the memory. Let it wash over you.”

Maul obeys.

It had been warm out that day, white clouds cutting broad streaks into the saber-blue sky. The walk back to his house from the barn had been as horribly mundane as it ever was. It had poured the previous night, and the dirt of the road had hardened in the sun into odd formations of mud, gouges left in the ground from debris dragged along it. 

He had thought the shape in the distance was more debris at first, some tiny chunk of wood torn from its tree and cast into the road. 

Then, he had gotten closer.

“Tell me what you see,” Tano whispers, even as he’s certain that she can see it too. 

“There is-- a bird.” 

“Good,” she tells him, excruciatingly softly. “What is the bird doing?”

“Dying,” Maul manages. This part, he remembers vividly-- the color of its blood against the soil, the pitiful way it had shuddered.

A pause. “And what do you do?”

Maul’s voice catches in his throat. He swallows, and tries again. “I pick it up, and I--”

The shrill, panicked ring of its chirping echoes through his head. 

“--I break its neck between my hands.”

“Why?” 

That horrible softness again. It makes Maul want to grind his teeth together until they break.

“To put it out of its misery.”

“You wanted to stop it from suffering.” A statement, not a question.

“It was useless,” Maul snaps. “It was weak. There was no point in it living longer.”

“So you chose to kill it.”

“I--” 

\--It--

\--It becomes too much to bear. Maul shakes his head sharply, shoving the fragile Force-connection out of his mind, hastily sealing familiar walls back into place. He stumbles to his feet, ignoring the way his breath hitches, his limbs shake. 

Tano opens her eyes, getting up far more gracefully. 

“That,” Maul spits, “was not _healing_.”

“The first step of any healing is to work through the pain,” Tano says quietly. “You just... have a lot more to work through than most.”

Maul draws in another breath, and curses how it shudders. For a moment, he deeply wishes that he had forced them both out into the storm after all. 

Rex clears his throat awkwardly. “Uh-- would either of you care to explain to me what just _happened_?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Tano tells him softly over her shoulder, hand a bit outstretched like she’d lay it on his shoulder if she was standing close enough. Maul has the fleeting, strange feeling like he is an intruder in his own house.

Tano hums, turning back to Maul. She shifts uncomfortably, opening her mouth and then closing it again as though there’s something she wants to ask.

Warily, Maul raises an eyeridge. 

“You don’t, uh-- you don’t happen to have anything to eat around here, do you?” Tano asks, and Maul is so grateful for the change of subject from their failed meditation that he simply nods at her and walks over to the kitchen-corner. 

“I hope that you don’t dislike bone broth,” he says to nobody in particular, pulling out a container of the stuff from the refrigeration unit and getting out a pot to heat it in. 

They eat in relative silence, broken only by the howling of the storm and the occasional clink of ceramic glassware. Maul is leaning against a counter; Tano and Rex have taken up their perches on the couch.

When they’re finished, he takes the empty mugs to the sink to rinse out, and, not for the first time, contemplates exactly what managed to bring him to _this_ of all moments. 

The mugs stare back at him like concave eyes. He doesn’t remember the last time he shared a meal with others at all, let alone _gave_ his own food freely to other people.

It makes a part of his brain feel strange, softened, like sweet-bread soaking up honey.

It makes a far larger part of his brain _crawl_. 

Outside, thunder crackles. Maul looks up from his task, momentarily distracted.

Across the room, Rex and Tano have half-heartedly started a new round of cards between themselves, some kind of poker game that Maul doesn’t recognise. As he watches, Rex gives the cards arrayed on the table a scathing look and throws his hand down in a fold. 

“We’re not gonna make it back to our ship tonight, are we,” he says, sounding defeated.

“It would be suicide to make that walk in the darkness,” Maul replies, and sighs deeply. Not for the first time, he wishes he had forced them to leave earlier. 

More than that, he wishes they simply hadn’t arrived at all. That almost would have been better than kicking them out himself. 

_Almost_ , he thinks derisively. 

The truth is, it _would_ have been better; and he can’t figure out _why_. The thought gnaws at him, and he opens his mouth again before he can think:

“You can sleep on the couches, if you feel so inclined. One of them should have a button on the side that folds it out.”

“Thank you,” Tano says quietly. She glances at Rex, who nods.

Maul looks away. They’re so— _familiar_ with each other. It makes something pull in his chest unpleasantly.

He places the now-clean mugs into the drying rack beside the sink and stalks across the room, pausing in the doorway of his bedroom.

“I’ll be in my sleeping quarters,” he says stiffly. “Wake me if there’s a fire.”

He presses the button to slide the door shut before either of them can respond.

* * *

Late, late into the night, Maul stares blankly at the ceiling. He’s long realized that he’s not going to be getting any sleep, not like this.

After so many months of solitude, the knowledge that there are other beings in his house with him creeps up the edges of his mind like an itch. 

They can’t possibly be _sleeping_ , not with him here, with nothing but a single, flimsy door separating them. They’re smarter than that. They know better. 

Yet still, the thought turns circles in his head. 

If they were talking, he would be able to hear them. If they were moving around, he would be able to sense them. 

And if they had _left--_

He casts his focus past the door, out into the main room. They’re still there. Of _course_ they’re still there.

Because as dense as they often seem, they’re not _idiots_.

He lifts himself out of bed and pads to the door, silent as he can manage on feet made of durasteel. The mechanism hisses like the warning of a predator as it opens, pitched high over the rain.

The living room is quiet and still. He creeps farther into it, and--

\--and there they are, almost exactly where he had left them, fast asleep on the couch. They hadn’t even bothered to fold it out, just collapsed half against the back of it and half onto each other, limbs all sprawled together. It can’t possibly be comfortable, sleeping like that.

The sight of it strikes an ache so deep into Maul’s chest that he feels like someone’s punched a hole through him. 

More than anything, he doesn’t-- he--

\--he doesn’t know _why_ . He doesn’t know why they’re _there_.

It’s inadvisable at best and suicide at worst to _sleep_ in the prescence of one’s enemy; Maul has known this as early as he could feel the pain of his failures to abide by it. He can’t fathom why the bewildering, wretched beings fast asleep on his couch _wouldn’t_.

The softness of the almost-presence brushes against his mind, and a shudder runs down his back. It’s too much. 

He swallows harshly and turns back into his bedroom. 

The whorl of blankets on his bed seems impossibly cold as he crawls back into it. His shoulders continue to shake long after he lays down. 

It’s because of the cold, he tells himself. The cold, and not the ghost of a touch that runs down his shoulder; not the weight that presses gently on his mind, that soothes the awful chasm in his chest. 

It’s only the cold.

**Author's Note:**

> the card that ahsoka drew was the two of hearts, by the way. not that it matters
> 
> also, sorry about the wonky italics; it's a pain to edit on anything above like 5k and i really wanted to get this posted


End file.
